In a short essay, explain how and why marketers go beyond selling a product or service to create brand experiences.
Answer: Sellers are most effective when they focus more on the benefits and experiences produced by their products and services than on the specific products and services themselves. Smart marketers focus on creating a brand experience, incorporating several products and services for their customers. By doing so, marketers hope to increase customer satisfaction, creating a body of customers who will repeatedly purchase their market offerings and recommend those offerings to friends. (Page ref. 7)
In a short essay, discuss the challenges and advantages that new communication technologies have created for marketers.
Answer: Through the Internet and related technologies, people can now interact in direct and surprisingly personal ways with large groups of others, from neighbors within a local community to people across the world. With communication technologies such as e-mail, blogs, Web sites, online communities, and online social networks, today’s marketers incorporate interactive approaches that help build targeted, two-way customer relationships. Marketers can create deeper consumer involvement and a sense of community surrounding a brand, making a brand a meaningful part of consumers’ conversations and lives.
However, while new communication tools create relationship-building opportunities for marketers, they also create challenges. They give consumers a greater voice, and therefore greater power and control in the marketplace. Today’s consumers have more information about brands than ever before, and they have a wealth of platforms for airing and sharing their brand views with other consumers. This benefits companies when views of its products are positive, but can be damaging when customers share stories of negative experiences with a company’s products. (page ref. 18)
Briefly explain the societal marketing concept. Give an example of an organization that has effectively used the societal marketing concept.
Answer: According to this concept, firms will succeed if they take underlying consumer needs and society’s well being into account over the long term. A pure marketing concept can damage consumers’ long-run welfare by focusing exclusively on satisfying consumers’ short-run wants. Over a long period of time, this too-narrow focus can be damaging to the company. In setting their marketing strategies, marketers today need to balance company profits, consumer wants, and society’s interests. Johnson & Johnson is an example of a company that has successfully implemented the societal marketing concept. The organization stresses honesty, integrity, and putting people before profits, an ethic that helped Johnson & Johnson quickly address and recover from the poisonous tampering of Tylenol capsules in 1982.(page ref.11)
Explain why the aim of customer relationship management is to create not just customer satisfaction, but also customer delight.
Answer: Customer satisfaction cannot be taken for granted. Because brand loyalty is dependent upon strong customer satisfaction, companies strive to retain, satisfy, and even delight current customers. Firms create customer delight by promising only what they can deliver and then delivering more than what they promised. They also create emotional relationships with key customers. Delighted customers make repeated purchases and become customers for life. More importantly, they also essentially become an unpaid sales force for the firm as “customer evangelists” who tell other potential customers about their positive experiences with the product.(page ref.13)
Define customer equity and explain how a company can increase it.
Answer: Customer equity is the sum of the lifetime values of all a company’s current and potential customers. Customer equity is dependent upon customer loyalty from a firm’s profitable customers. Because customer equity is a reflection of a company’s future, companies must manage it carefully, viewing customers as assets that need to be maximized. To increase customer equity, companies should work to delight their customers and establish full relationships with their most profitable customers. (page ref.23)
